Vincent Reynolds

The negative reviews this series is getting from ideological cranks isn't deserved. The show isn't even particularly political. A bunch of people are trying to slander the show. First of, the charge of new lore or breaking canon is just a lie. Have these detractors even seen The Clone Wars series? Much of the lore seen in episode 3 draws from that and Star Wars video games. The writing of the series is much better than Star Wars has ever been, apart from Andor. It is a mystery/suspense show and I think some fans aren't happy with the extra thinking required. But it makes the series better than average. There are some flaws with the pacing and some scenes the acting is sub-par but mostly, the production is above expectations from such a small budget for cast and crew. Give it chance before believing the slander.

I watched this and it was worth watching from my perspective at least. A reviewer at Mondo Bizarro blog quite panned it, but I don't think he was paying attention, he got critical plot details completely misread. And SPOILERS at the end of this review, so stop at the dashing line to preserve a few precious surprises in this otherwise dull and unhappy story. The heroine cunningly straps herself to a rocket, yes, but it is established clearly that it is a cargo rocket going 70 kilometers only, Still an eyebrow-raiser as normal humans can't handle more than a few Gs, but maybe this non-Earthlike planet has a super-low gravity to overcome. it was also established that she has genetic and technological enhancements and has already survived quite a bit of abuse. The visual effects are more than adequate for a micro-budget effort. More damning, there seems to be only four significant characters counting her ship's 'HAL'-like AI and no dialogue apart from a mother and daughter and the latter AI. And almost the whole plot is revealed as a memory flashback. We see other ancient figures, a father and some aliens and a couple of early human Mars colonials. Sadly, everyone in this movie is at too drastic remove of human evolution from one another to relate to anyone else. But 12 years after this came out that feels very pertinent to American experience--ideological factions squabbling their differences out with uncaring finality and nationalist and exterminating vitriol. In this dystopic film human relationship is highlighted by absence. It does seem over the top to end this story at the end of time, when only one dutiful space colonel's daughter and two jarheaded idiot ancestors remain of the human race... but to be fair, Doctor Who does this same plot all of the time with only moderately more compassion to the idiot primitives who need 'the end of time' explained to them with several kicks and punches to keep them from raiding one's last few minutes of life support. As far as I know, this movie pays some respect to the physics of that ending at least. If humans can't emotionally take in their eventual demise when our universe collapses in 15 billion years, well there are three aliens who are at least philosophically ready to gamble they can live past it. Without them this would be indeed a dismal and daunting statement: humans suck at not exterminating themselves long before the end of all things, and if we want to live on in someone else's memory, we'd better evolve spiritually. And that is a worthwhile, if fatalist, message for those who can pay attention to plot cues in the middle of scenes that seem to be dull and long between the fights. Also needed is a fair grasp of the Standard Model of Physics, the Big Bang and the Big Crunch, the premise of time travel, hyperspace, but mostly patience for the wider storyline at the end that is only barely articulated, that the heroic daughter has used time travel and cryosleep but all her efforts at holding memory of humanity have gone cruelly awry. OK, SPOILER AHEAD, so stop here to avoid discussion of major plot twist in an otherwise sadly fatal arc of human failure. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The movie gets a few things courageously correct against sci-fi adventure tropes, like following painful commands to instantly eliminate a double agent one might have feelings for instead of trying to 'bring them over to the good side'. I suspect that covert agents get a lot of practice ignoring such overtures. While drama (and joy) might have been served by some kind of human alliance or relationship in the midst of a 'final solution' warfare, such dramatic turns of prior loyalty have their limits... Yes, this story would have been MUCH lightened by such a turn, but such was obviously not the aim of the producers, who clearly worked hard to defeat such unreal wishes and produce a fatalist commentary on human inability to get along an a species-wide scale.